1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computing networks. It more particularly relates to peer-to-peer (“P2P”) networks and to dynamically creating chat rooms and forming communities.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional Internet chat systems use centralized servers. Within these systems, chat rooms are statically or dynamically created, but the rooms are publicly listed and are administered by the central server. Exemplary systems include chat rooms administered by AOL, MSN and Yahoo! These chat rooms do not allow for individual users to administer the chat rooms. In particular, individual users are limited with respect to managing chat room admission, i.e., cannot determine which and how many users can join a chat room.
Because of the centralized nature of Internet chat rooms, they are frequently targets of malicious users or “spammers” posting unrelated or off-topic messages such as advertisements. These off-topic messages effectively create a type of denial of service attack within the chat rooms by making the ratio of useful messages to spam messages very low.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and system for a peer-to-peer instant messaging and chat room system.